


we can reach the constellations

by dansunedisco



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Compliant, F/F, Femslash February, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, Humor, Mentioned Luke Skywalker, POV Rey (Star Wars), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:55:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dansunedisco/pseuds/dansunedisco
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What’s he like?” Jess asks. The question is rushed, frantic. “What’s Luke Skywalker like?”</p><p>Rey does a double take. A TIE fighter screams overhead while a platoon of stormtroopers advance on their position in the rock quarry, and the question posed is not one she’s expecting. Who would care about Luke Skywalker’s disposition in the middle of a firefight? “Fine,” she blurts out, mostly because she’s at a loss on what else to say. “He’s -- great.”</p><p>-</p><p>Jess, Rey, and a mission that draws them inexplicably together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we can reach the constellations

**Author's Note:**

> title from [we'll be the stars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bFZg_SMUhM)
> 
> mild spoilers for the force awakens, and the _before the awakening_ novel.

“What’s he like?” Jess asks. The question is rushed, frantic. “What’s Luke Skywalker like?”

Rey does a double take. A TIE fighter screams overhead while a platoon of stormtroopers advance on their position in the rock quarry, and the question posed is not one she’s expecting. Who would care about Luke Skywalker’s disposition in the middle of a firefight? “Fine,” she blurts out, mostly because she’s at a loss on what else to say. “He’s -- great.”

Jess nods. She hitches her blaster up and pulls the trigger. There’s an echoing thud of a well met target in the distance. “Give me, like, an example.”

“Can’t this wait?” The sound of blaster-fire grows louder, and Rey can feel more than see the enemy approaching. Another minute and they will be overtaken, captured -- or worse. “We really need to move!”

There’s a narrow pathway between a boulder and a rock wall they can squeeze between that looks like it will take them clear to the other side, and it’s the one they take. It’s a tight fit, claustrophobic even, but they wedge through without looking back. They skid through the passage and follow its twists and turns, running until the only sound Rey hears is the her and Jess’ harsh breathing echoing off the walls surrounding them. It’s been months since she’s had to run for her life. She almost forgot how unpleasant it is.

Eventually, the path widens into a circular, dimly lit cavern where three equally potentially treacherous paths shoot off.

“Which one?” Jess asks.

Rey frowns. There were several cave systems on Jakku, all of them dangerous, some of them deadly. The biggest foul-up was going too far without knowing how to get back, or how long it would take to get to the other side, if there was an other side at all. She heard of scavengers using them during the _X’us’R’iia,_ never to be seen again. For that reason alone, she kept to the Graveyard, venturing upwards instead of below to find her meager treasures. She’s not looking forward to an introduction. “If one of them has an air current, we might have a way out,” she says. “Do you have a matchstick? Something that can burn?”

“I think I have something in my… here!”

“Thanks.” She strikes the stick against the rockface and holds it to the mouth of the leftmost path. The flame didn’t move. “Damn! One of these _have_ to lead outside…”

Unluckily (or, perhaps, luckily), both the middle and rightmost draw the flame.

“Perhaps we should split up,” Rey offers, but Jess shakes her head.

“Let’s stick to one, and go together. The last thing we need is to end up on separate sides of the mountain with no way back to one another.”

The sound of stormtrooper radio chatter echoes through the cave then, and Rey and Jess exchange looks. It’s clear that the time to debate the merits of either path is up.

“At least they're not using dioxis. After you,” Jess says, and Rey makes the swift decision to go down the middle. It’s the most obvious choice -- and one she hopes the stormtroopers think she wouldn’t take for that simple reason.

They hurry, neither of them having to express the magnitude of their very bad situation to spur them on.

Rey keeps a hand against Jess’ upper back, the other against the rock wall for balance. She glances down the path they’re traversing every few seconds, eyes straining to see shapes in the shadows. Shapes that, she’s pretty sure, won’t be coming. Still, the calm doesn’t come. She hears a voice echo in the back of her mind, urging her to find her calm, her center, but the still waters of the force seem too far away to reach in this moment.

“Oof!” Jess jerks to a halt and Rey stumbles behind her. “Sorry, it’s -- dark. I tripped on something.”

“It’s fine. Can you keep going?”

“Yeah, yeah I can.”

And they do, for what feels like a very long time. Murky light spills through from occasional open crevice, but it’s otherwise dark, and both she and Jess trip up several times on the uneven ground. The only respite is the breeze that blows through the passage like a lifeline to the other side.

The mission wasn’t supposed to be like this, Rey thinks. The small First Order outpost they were supposed to disable turned out to be a decent-sized hub, and she’s not sure the distress signal they pinged to D’Qar went through before comms went dead.

They were caught early, and forced to flee. Worse yet, they had to go in the opposite direction of their ships. If the Resistance heard them, they might receive an assist. If they didn’t, she and Jess would have to find their way back to their transports alone and, preferably, undiscovered.

Both option required a lot of luck. Luck, as their current predicament indicates, they didn’t have in spades.

Rey lets her mind wander, pressing towards livelier things, when she suddenly remembers Jess’ earlier questioning. Jess isn’t the first person -- nor the last, Rey’s sure -- to ask her about Luke Skywalker. After all, he disappeared in a shroud of secrecy, and she was the one to find him. But most people didn’t want to know what he was _like_. They wanted to know why he left in the first place, if the myths and legends were true, and they certainly didn’t ask when stormtroopers were almost on top of them. It takes her a minute to realize she’s smiling foolishly into the dark, thinking of Jess and her enthusiasm for the Jedi legend, and she tries her best to suppress her thoughts.

This is the third mission she and Jess have been paired. The first was by chance. The second and third -- well, Rey would be lying if she said she didn’t go out of her way to drop a bug in Poe’s ear about her choice in partner.

She _likes_ Jess. The other woman is quietly fierce, with a wry sense of humor and nerves of durasteel; traits that seem to be a requirement for being a starship pilot, and doubly so for those in Poe’s squadron. But she’s _nice_ , too -- though it took Rey altogether too long to cotton-on to the fact that Jess was being _helpful_ for the sake of goodwill, and just that. Everyone in the Resistance is, really. But Jess is quickly becoming Rey’s favorite friendly face.

Eventually, they reach another split in the passage, and Jess wordlessly strikes a match. The wind from the leftmost tunnel is strong enough to extinguish the flame, and Jess gives Rey a pleased grin before continuing on.

“We might just make it out of here,” Jess says.

“Did you think we wouldn’t?”

“I’m not _that_ pessimistic, but I gotta admit that today hasn’t been the easiest on my nerves. I’m way more comfortable behind a yoke.”

Rey, having experienced the unadulterated joy of her own ship, has to agree. Still, “Space is dangerous.”

“True, but I’m _good_ in a dogfight. Sneaking around on the ground isn’t my forte.”

“I find it quite refreshing, actually.”

Jess laughs. “Which I why I’m more than happy to follow your lead. Hey, I see some light up ahead!”

Rey sees it, too. They both heave a relieved breath when they reach the end, which is nothing more than a hole in the side of the mountain that, thankfully, has a rudimentary path that slopes down into a dense forest. A part of Rey whispers that their escape was a little too easy, too convenient, and she quickly scans the horizon with her macrobinoculars to quell her worries. There's a chance the First Order sent out patrol droids to sniff them out, though Rey isn't sure they've been marked as anything but overly curious interlopers who encroached on the wrong terrain. Possible, but unlikely.

“Anything?” Jess asks. She’s shielding her eyes from the sunshine, her own macros accidentally dropped back in the forest where they were first intercepted.

“Nothing. And if I’m seeing that formation correctly, we’re on the completely wrong side of where we need to be.” She sighs, and stows the macros in her satchel. There isn’t much to be done but try and loop around with a wide enough berth to avoid detection. “You wouldn’t have to have a spare speeder in your pockets, would you?”

“I wish! Let’s get into that forest first,” Jess says, “and then we can plan our daring escape. I don’t want Poe Dameron to be the only one with a harrowing tale, so think big, Rey. Enormous. Okay?”

“I’ll try my best.”

The trek to the forest is more difficult than it looked at first glance. The rock-filled dirt underfoot crumbles with each step, but they eventually make it to the ravine with minimal trouble. They hustle into the forest, walking further and further into the trees. So far, in fact, that when Rey turns to look, the quarry from where they came from is no longer visible.

She takes a deep breath. The air smells _green_ , just like it did on Takodana, but the similarity is a lackluster comfort.

“What can we do about comms?” Jess asks. “I’d rather not go into this completely blind.”

“We might have to,” Rey replies. “There’s nothing wrong with my transmitter. My guess is they’re jamming out-going signals.”

“I didn’t think that was possible.”

Rey hitches her shoulders up. There was a lot of impossible-made-possible lately, some of it she still can’t entirely believe. A weapon ripping through space-time to destroy an entire _system_. Her, force-sensitive, and apprenticed to Luke Skywalker.

“Can you undo it?” Jess asks. “‘It’ being the jam.”

“Not from here, but -- if we can get a droid… maybe.” She bites her lip, thinking of all the search-and-destroy droids in the First Order arsenal. If they can disable one without losing a limb in the process, and if she can bypass the programming… maybe, just maybe, she could splice her transmitter into its system and send an encrypted signal to their allies. In a perfect world, without the Order ever knowing, too.

“That’s a tall order,” Jess says, once Rey explains her idea. She cracks a grin. “But I like it.”

“Thanks. Doesn’t solve the problem of getting us to our ships, though.”

“I thought you said you had a speeder lying around.”

“Ha ha, Jess. I believe I might’ve mentioned _walking_ , actually.”

They walk another kilometer due north before starting a gradual southeast course. The foliage above is thick, sunlight breaking through the gaps in spurts, but it’s warm on the ground, and seems to only grow hotter, more humid, as the days goes on. Rey is used to the dry desert heat, and finds the humidity stifling and unpleasant. Jess, on the other hand, seems to relish in it.

“It’s just like home,” Jess replies when Rey comments on it. She swipes a hand across her forehead, and Rey’s eyes jump back to focus on the sweat beading along Jess’ hairline. It’s -- distracting.

She forces herself to blink. “Which is?”

“Dandoran. It’s right in Hutt space. Lots of smuggling cartels -- enough to get caught up in you’re not careful, but it’s alright. At least, I liked it.”

“If you insist,” Rey teases. She doesn’t have many, or any, fond memories of Jakku, except for maybe leaving, but it’s nice to see someone else reminiscing pleasantly of their home planet.

“What about you?”

She blinks. Another unexpected question. “Me?”

“Mmhm.”

She doesn’t have much to say about Jakku, or the years she spent there, but she tries. “I once rebuilt a ship. An Ghtroc Industries 690, to be more specific. Spent almost a year scraping together the parts before she’d fly.” She winces after she says it, realizing that it sounds more like bragging than an attempt at sharing an anecdote.

Jess spins around. “You _what_? That’s amazing! I’m not bad a fixing ‘em up myself, but I’ve never done a complete rebuild before.” She smiles. “When we get off this rock, maybe you can show me a thing or two.”

Rey’s stomach swims, and a feeling she’s beginning to attribute to Jess’ smile bubbles up in her chest. The way Jess is looking at her -- she could do with having that look turned her way every day. She nods, and tries to suppress the giddy smile that threatens to crack her nonchalance. “Sure,” she says.

Jess bites her lip. “What happened to it, if you don’t mind me asking? I mean -- you have the _Millennium Falcon_ now, but...”

“It’s a long story,” Rey says, thinking of Dev and Strunk and the first time she felt trust. “I’ll tell you about it on the way home.”

 

 

Their next obstacle is a fast-moving river with banks too far apart to jump across, even with a Force-assisted push. Both Jess and Rey stand with their hands on their hips atop the grassy knoll that rolls down to the muddy lip of the river. They look at one another.

“This isn’t the worst thing we’ve encountered. Better than stormtroopers, right?” Jess tries. “Think we can swim across?”

“The current looks strong… but it wouldn’t hurt to try.” She doesn’t mention the time she nearly drowned on Ahch-To training with Master Luke. Best to take that hurdle when the time comes, she thinks.

Jess steps in first. The river water catches around her ankles, then her shines, her knees. “It drops off over here,” she calls out when the water is halfway up her thighs. “I can make it. I think.”

“Maybe we should search for a natural bridge,” Rey suggests.

Jess puts her hands on her head with a dejected sigh. She turns around. The look on her face belays her disappointment, and her tone doubly so when she says, “I think maybe we should.”

They walk for several more kilometers, following the natural path of the river, before they come to a fallen tree that almost makes it across. It’s a decent hop to the other side, but they decide to go for it after a moment’s deliberation.

“If anything, we can swim the rest of the way,” Jess says.

Rey goes first. She tiptoes across the log, careful with her footing. The surface of the tree has decayed under the spray of water; enough that it wouldn’t take much to slip off into the river below. It doesn’t frighten her. A flat surface traverse is nothing compared to scaling the scuttled _Inflictor_.

“It’s a little tricky,” she calls back, when she finally makes it to the end of the fallen tree, “but not terribly bad. Alright, I’m going to jump!”

“Be careful!”

She gives herself a running start and launches herself towards the opposite bank. She lands with a soft ‘oof’, pinwheeling her arms for balance before righting herself. She waves Jess on with an encouraging smile.

 

They make it another kilometer before they stumble on a droid that is zipping through the trees with purpose. Rey yanks Jess behind tree cover just in time, and extends her hand. She flicks her wrist, and the motion sends the droid spinning off its axis and into a thick treetrunk. The droid lets out a stunned series of beeps, its programming probably trying its hardest to adjust to its sudden -- and unexplainable -- change in course. Rey doesn’t let it come to its senses. She sprints towards the droid and yanks its biometrics chip free with a murmured, “Sorry.”

“Whoa,” Jess breathes, “you just used the _force._ ”

Rey nods absently, her fingers already fiddling with transplanting the transmitter into the droid’s systems. Time is of the essence, she knows. Whoever’s in charge of this droid has probably already noted its offline status. “There!” she crows, the transmitter blinking to life with a live signal.

Jess taps in her encryption code, and their coordinates. “Yes! You’re a lifesaver, Rey.”

“We haven’t made it back to the ship just yet.”

“No, but this is amazing -- you’re _amazing_.” She flushes as soon as the words come free, and her smile turns shy. Maybe even a little self-deprecating. “I really think so.”

“Amazing,” she repeats, and realizes _now_ would be the time to verbalize her own affections. But the words catch in her throat, a decade of holding her feelings and dreams so close to her chest not yet scrubbed away by newfound friendships. Instead, she reaches for Jess’ hand and curls her fingers around Jess’, willing her thoughts to pour through with that one touch.

They share a look then, one that feels entirely significant to Rey. They’re both crouched over a First Order droid, on a hostile outpost planet, and currently unable to escape -- but there’s a calm, a _rightness_ , that has settled over her; as if anything she encounters now will be fine, and all because she’s here with someone she cares about.

Of course, the tranquility is blown to smithereens by a blaster shot much, much too close for comfort.

 

The ensuing escape is quite daring -- though, by squadron vote, not quite enough to eclipse Poe’s story. Still, Rey spends an exorbitant amount of time scrubbing the carbon scoring from Jess’ re-fitted X-wing, and tinkering and tweaking its systems for optimal function.

The promise of shared stories come then, in these quiet moments: in the hanger, Rey on the permacrete, Jess handing her wrenches between probing questions; the both of them covered in grime and grit. It feels as natural as breathing air, and no one’s surprised when Rey kisses Jess for the first time.

“I’ve been waiting for you to do that for _forever_ ,” Jess says softly, fingers hovering a fraction away from Rey’s jaw.

There’s a buzz in the air, and a giddiness in Rey’s chest, and kissing Jess comes easy.

“I’m truly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she replies, and leans in to press a soft kiss to Jess’ lips once more.


End file.
